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April 20, 2005

Mossberg on MSN Spaces

From: WSJ.com - Personal Technology: "However, in typical Microsoft fashion, Spaces works best when you use Internet Explorer in Windows. For instance, unless you use Internet Explorer in Windows, you can't make your text bold or italic or colored. You can't turn words you enter into Web links. And you can't create separate paragraphs in your entries."

I liked the photos thing they do, but paragraphs....you can't create paragraphs? This is nuts. Has the internet gone insane? I didn't know that text boxes were that damn hard to put in a web form. Here, if any msn spaces people are reading this... what you're looking for is the 'textarea' box. Maybe one of those html book dealies might help you out.

And Mossberg ends with "Still, MSN Spaces is a good, basic blogging service that I can recommend to any novice blogger." , so long as they use IE, right? Enjoy those pop-ups, newcomers. Why don't you use a browser that doesn't hate you?

3 comments:

Well, can't is putting it a little strongly; have to type your own HTML if you're such a big brave intarweb hero that you don't use the one true browser on the one true OS.

But since it would take me half an hour to do a Greasemonkey script to give Spaces em/strong/link buttons and do auto-paragraphs (maybe 45 minutes if I needed to strip the paragraphs back out while re-editing), it does seem like excess tying to insist that you can't have anything if you don't use IE's whizzy editor.

It's all about the CBA. If you're Microsoft, and you're using an advertising/direct marketing model for your free service, are Linux/Mozilla users really in your target demo? Is it worth it, then, to spend that much time rewriting the WYSIWYG editor to support the remaining non Win/IE users (who, incedentally, are probably HTML saavy as phil points out)?

Now, as FFox starts to slowly bleed users away from IE (I, myself, use it for everything except work stuff), that may change. It's all economics.